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Diet and Mobility in the Corded Ware of Central Europe

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Diet and Mobility in the Corded Ware of Central Europe RESEARCH ARTICLE Diet and Mobility in the Corded Ware of Central Europe Karl-Göran Sjögren1*, T. Douglas Price2, Kristian Kristiansen1 1 Department of Historical Studies, Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden, 2 Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, United States of America * [email protected] Abstract Isotopic investigations of two cemetery populations from the Corded Ware Culture in south- ern Germany reveal new information on the dating of these graves, human diet during this period, and individual mobility. Corded Ware Culture was present across much of temperate a11111 Europe ca. 2800–2200 cal. BC and is represented by distinctive artifacts and burial prac- tices. Corded Ware was strongly influenced by the Yamnaya Culture that arose in the steppes of eastern Europe and western Eurasia after 3000 BC, as indicated by recent aDNA research. However, the development of CW on different chronological and spatial scales has to be evaluated. Examination of the CW burials from southern Germany sup- ports an argument for substantial human mobility in this period. Several burials from grave- OPEN ACCESS fields and larger samples from two large cemeteries at Lauda-Königshofen "Wöllerspfad" Citation: Sjögren K-G, Price TD, Kristiansen K and at Bergheinfeld “Hühnerberg” contributed the human remains for our study of bone and (2016) Diet and Mobility in the Corded Ware of tooth enamel from the Corded Ware Culture. Our results suggest that Corded Ware groups Central Europe. PLoS ONE 11(5): e0155083. in this region at least were subsisting on a mix of plant and animal foods and were highly doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0155083 mobile, especially the women. We interpret this as indicating a pattern of female exogamy, Editor: Peter F. Biehl, University at Buffalo, UNITED involving different groups with differing economic strategies. STATES Received: November 24, 2015 Accepted: April 23, 2016 Published: May 25, 2016 The Corded Ware Culture Copyright: © 2016 Sjögren et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the The archaeological phenomenon referred to as the Corded Ware (CW) culture is one of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits more enigmatic, as well as widely discussed, in European prehistory. Archaeologically it has been unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any defined by a set of material traits, such as cord-ornamented beakers and amphorae, shaft-hole medium, provided the original author and source are battle axes, and standardised burial practices involving single, sex-differentiated inhumations credited. under barrows, oriented east-west, in contracted (hocker) positions [1]. These burials generally Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are date between ca. 2800–2200 BC and are found over a very large area in central, northern, and within the paper and its Supporting Information files. eastern Europe (Fig 1). Under the general CW rubric, a number of regionally-defined cultures Funding: European Research Council, Advanced have been subsumed, such as the Single Grave Culture in Denmark, Holland and N. Germany, Grant ERC-2010-AdG -Proposal n° 269442 THE the Battle Axe Culture of Sweden, Norway and Finland, and the Fatjanovo Culture in Russia. RISE https://erc.europa.eu/. The wide geographic distribution and the perceived homogeneity of the culture, coupled with Competing Interests: The authors have declared the lack of identified settlements, have given risen to debates regarding the interpretation of this that no competing interests exist. phenomenon. The discussions have concerned among other things the origin of the culture, the PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0155083 May 25, 2016 1/33 Diet and Mobility in the Corded Ware of Central Europe Fig 1. Map of the Corded Ware culture. Redrawn from Müller et al [2], with public domain background data. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0155083.g001 mechanism behind its introduction, the identification of a network instead of a mono- or poly- thetic "culture", the identification of marriage practices, the spread of a common ideology, whether its carriers were also Indo-European speakers, and the nature of settlement and economy. Regarding the formation of the CW, some archaeologists point out the contribution of dif- ferent regions to the material set of the "CW-network", while others note similarities with the steppe, in particular with the Yamnaya culture, as a possible area of origin. This is based on similarities in burial rituals. Some authors have suggested that this culture practiced a form of mobile pastoralism, which spread towards the west through migration and/or cultural influ- ence, and gave rise to the CW. In the process, Indo-European language would also have spread over Europe [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Recently, these hypotheses have gained support from aDNA studies of Yamnaya and CW burials. Allentoft et al [8] and Haak et al. [9] show that a genetic transfor- mation took place in areas where previous Neolithic DNA was heavily reduced and comple- mented by Yamnaya DNA. This new genetic presence was lasting and provided much of the genetic material for contemporary European populations. There is increasing evidence for some kind of population reduction or crisis toward the end of the middle Neolithic facilitating this introduction of new genes (e.g. [10]) and recent research has documented the presence of plague among Yamnaya and Corded Ware individuals [11], which may have spread among Neolithic populations prior to the migrations. This needs to be explored in future research. At the macro-historical level, the old debate over migration versus local adaptation thus seems to be solved. However, we still do not know how migration and other formation pro- cesses unfolded in the various regions, and regional variability is evident [12]. Also we have rather scant evidence of the social and economic processes once the Corded Ware Culture was PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0155083 May 25, 2016 2/33 Diet and Mobility in the Corded Ware of Central Europe established, but the Eulau cemetery has demonstrated that relations between non Corded Ware and Corded Ware groups could be hostile [13]. Two main propositions have been put forward regarding CW economy. A long-standing tradition has viewed these groups as mobile herders, influenced by the pastoral nomadism ascribed to steppe societies such as the Yamnaya with whom they are likely related [7,8,14]. This view has been mainly supported by negative evidence such as the problems of finding identifiable settlements and house remains in most of the CW regions. This also implies a lack of direct evidence for subsistence (macrofossils, animal bones, etc.). More recently, several authors have argued that CW subsistence economy was a kind of mixed agriculture, not dis- similar to other European Neolithic cultures. These arguments have been based on recent finds of settlements [15, 16,17, 2]. On these sites, both domestic animals and cultivated cereals have been identified. The character and the relative proportion of cultivation vs. husbandry is open to discussion, however. At the Wattendorf settlement in NE Bavaria, for instance, cattle were prominent among the faunal remains, but sheep, goats, pigs and horses were also found. Hunt- ing played a notable role as well, while fish remains were not identified in spite of good preser- vation [18, 2]. Remains of cereals as well as pulses were also recovered, and agricultural activity at the site is indicated by Late Neolithic colluvium formation on the southern slopes of the hill [2]. Abundant finds of cereals, predominantly emmer, are documented at lakeside settlements from the alpine foreland [19, 20]. At Zürich-Mozartstrasse in Switzerland cattle dominated during the CW phase, and the landscape was more open than in previous periods [21]. A simi- lar opening of the landscape for grazing is also documented from Jutland, Denmark, and more widely in northern Europe [6, 22]. For Schleswig-Holstein and SW Germany on the other hand, detailed pollen sequences suggest a heavily forested landscape [23, 20]. Several of the ideas referred above rely on assumptions regarding human subsistence econ- omy and human mobility, but direct data for these issues have been scarce, with a few excep- tions [24, 25, 26]. One of the goals of our project is to examine these questions in the Corded Ware Culture. Were these groups mobile herders or settled farmers, or did they employ a vari- ety of strategies? In this paper, we report a series of new isotope measurements on human skel- etal material and discuss their implications for the interpretation of the CW. Terms like mobility and migration may cover a variety of different processes connected with residential change. Variation may include the spatial extent of movement (short distance/ long distance), the temporality (short term/seasonal/permanent), directionality (one-direc- tional/bi-directional/multidirectional), social context of movement (eg. marriage exchange, trade, social gatherings, captivity, flight, or other), or the number of people involved. For the purposes of this paper, we refer to migration as permanent, directional movement of groups of people, while mobility is a general term covering all kinds of movement. More specific interpre- tations of types of mobility are explained in the text. Site Descriptions Seven sites with CW burials have been sampled for this study. Four are in the Danube basin in SE Bavaria, close to the Danube and the Isar Rivers. Three sites are in NW Bavaria-NE Baden- Württemberg (Fig 2). These sites are located in the Main and Tauber river basins. The sample sites belong to two different regional groups of the CW, namely the South Bavarian group and the Franconian group [27, 28]. The sites are described briefly below. Altdorf The site of Altdorf is in Niederbayern, near the town of Landau an der Isar. It is located some 4 km N of the Isar River (a tributary of the Danube).
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